


never dreamt of such sterile hands

by possessedradios



Series: Treppenwitz [3]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: (Listen I'm sorry for that one but also I'm not.), (in which I continue to pick titles from songs by always the same band), Blood, Gen, Gun Violence, Gunplay (briefly), POV Second Person, Very vague but kinda fucked up blowjob, Wannabe character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 20:37:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13911756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possessedradios/pseuds/possessedradios
Summary: You’re 17 and you push a needle through the skin just below your only friend’s lower lip.(It's messier than you thought it'd be, and it affects not your capability to fire a gun, but it does affect what murder makes you think of.)





	never dreamt of such sterile hands

**Author's Note:**

> Written for and inspired by Mer (and partially by Daniel), and I actually wanted this to be something else (don't ask me what, exactly), but it's past midnight and I have a German exam tomorrow so I guess that's just what it is now, dhsafk.  
> Also, title is taken from "Australia" by The Shins.

You’re 17 and you push a needle through the skin just below your only friend’s lower lip. 

You’re seated on her bed, cross-legged, with your back against the wall and her head in your lap, which you’d think is beautiful, in a metaphorical sense, if you weren’t too drunk to consider thoughts so elaborate or coherent. But you are drunk, drunk enough to call her your friend in your head, which, incidentally, is the only reason you agreed to this. You want her to be quiet, want to be alone with the soft buzzing in your head, senseless static that leaves you with a feeling of some kind of empty contentment. It masks all the bubbling anger, lurking somewhere behind the corners of your mind you try not to glance around when you're with her because she refuses to put up with you when you snap and yell at her. So instead of arguing about it, you agree and soak your hands in disinfectant, splash some on her skin, and she licks her lips because she’s just as drunk. 

“You sure about this?” you ask, needle already in your hand, and she nods and grins at you. 

“Come oooon, do it! Do it, do it!”

You have half a mind to tell her, again, that she should just try and save up enough money to get her lip pierced by a professional, but it seems like too much effort, so instead you gently hold her lower lip between two fingers and press the needle through her flesh. You almost slip halfway through, and it’s much harder than you thought it would be, there’s much more resistance. She winces violently and you curse under your breath.

“Fuck, that– Wait–”

She squeezes her eyes shut, but there’s a few tears running down her cheeks anyway and her breathing sounds strained and your fingers slip off her lip because they’re suddenly full of blood. You stare at it for a few seconds. There’s something captivating to it; bright scarlet, staggeringly vibrant in the dimly lit room, and you wonder whether the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling would reflect off it if you turned off the light. You wiggle the needle a bit, caught by a sudden sense of urgency, and realize only after you’ve finally pushed it through that this was probably not the most sensible thing to do. She’s clutching her blanket with one hand and slowly blinks up at you. You snort.

“You look fucking ridiculous,” you mumble, because it’s true, teary-eyed and with a needle half inside and half outside her mouth. She tries to laugh, and there’s blood running down her chin.

“Ouch,” she says once you’ve pulled the needle out, and you say, “Stop whining, you wanted this,” and push the piercing through the too-small hole and lose the tiny ball three or four times because your fingers are slick from her blood before you finally manage to screw it on.

“Do I look good?” she asks, and you consider her for a moment, but all you see is the blood still dripping down, welling up and pushing its way around the ring around her lip; you didn’t think it’d bleed so much, you didn’t think, for some reason, it would bleed at all, and suddenly you’re overly aware of the fact that this is proof of her humanity, proof that she’s real, breathing, alive, and you panic. It’s not the blood itself, or the fact that you hurt your only friend, it’s just– It’s so much blood, it was inside of her and now it’s outside because of a hole you’ve made into her and she’s (still) alive. The realization hits you like a punch to the face and leaves you feeling that much more sober. You swallow and feel sick and your fingers are wet and sticky. 

You nod.

“Knew it,” she says. “Hurts like hell, though.” She carefully touches the ring and winces again, inhaling sharply.

“Stop touching it,” you say and your voice is far away, and at some point later, you probably decide to sleep, because the next thing you know is that she’s lying next to you with your back turned towards you, and that you’re staring at the ceiling, counting the glowing stars, and that your fingers feel gross because you didn’t bother washing them.

When you wake up in the morning, you stare at her bed, because the pillow is full of blood and parts of the bedsheets are full of blood, and there’s bloody fingerprints and you know they’re yours, and you feel sick again, which, to be fair, could just as well be the hangover, as well.

She just shrugs and says, “My bed looks worse once a month, really, I always forget that I get my period,” and she grimaces while talking and there’s dried blood on her skin and later, over breakfast you can’t bring yourself to eat, her mom frowns at her and sighs, shaking her head.

“It will get infected, oh awfully irresponsible daughter mine,” she says.

“Nah, we used half a bottle of disinfectant.”

It does get infected and she has to take it out and there will be a scar you’ll be able to see if you know it’s there, even years later.

* * *

(You’re 17 and you steal one of your father’s guns.

You spend hours standing in the hallway in front of your parents’ bedroom, clutching it in one hand, clicking the safety on and off. Your hand is steady and the silence feels heavy around you; it seems to embrace you, like a hug, like a cocoon. You click the safety on.

Your sports bag is ready in your own room, you’ve packed a few things just in case. Just in case, just in case, because you’re not sure that you will or won’t do it, you never are. You click the safety off.

It’s so dark. It’s so silent it’s deafening, and you remember. You remember her bloodstained chin, remember the red drops on her pillow, on the sheets, remember your fingers, stained just as red, remember how brilliant the color had looked like even in semi-darkness. You try to imagine his blood on the pillow, welling up from a hole inside his head like it did from just below her lower lip.

You close your eyes, click the safety back on and return to your room.)

* * *

You’re 19 and over your earpiece, a voice orders you to

“Finish this, he’s of no use.”

There must be something in your eyes, because the man in front of you takes a step back, then another one. He freezes when you take out the safety, and his right hand flies to the front of his lab coat to pick and pull at one of the buttons. Nervous habit, clearly, the button is already loose. 

Your hand is steady, your mind incredibly sharp and focused, and you notice everything around you – the soft static in your left ear now that Littlewood isn’t talking, the sound of rain drumming against the window somewhere to your right, the smell of fired guns like burnt sulfur all around you, the dull throbbing of an impending headache somewhere inside you, paired with the comfortable weight of your bulletproof clothing.

Your index finger, curled around the trigger.

“Please,” the stranger in front of you whispers, and then repeats, louder, “Please, oh God, please don’t–”

The sound of the shot rings through the corridor, and he stumbles back before collapsing like a toy someone forgot to wind up all the way. His lifeless body makes a dull sound when it hits the floor and there’s blood and skull fragments and bits and pieces of his oh so brilliant brain that couldn’t save him in the end. You swallow and taste something bitter on your tongue and you think of her, of her bedroom, the dried blood on her chin. The memories rush over you with an abruptness so violent that you, for a moment, have to steady yourself against the nearest wall, and you take a deep breath and say, “Fuck,” because you haven’t thought about her in months and looking back, the amount of blood was nothing, working for the SI-5 has done wonders for putting things like that into perspective.

“Kepler?” Nguyen’s voice this time, and you nod sharply even though you’re not sure she can see it. 

“You freaking out?” 

“No, sir,” you say, because you’re not. You take your hand off the wall and remember your bloody fingerprints on her yellow bedsheets.

“Good. Backdoor, two minutes. Good job, kiddo.” Nguyen is smiling, you can hear it, and you nod again and only scarcely avoid stepping into the mess on the floor as you make your way to the exit.

* * *

(You’re 19 and Kerr has a gun to your head.

The sun hasn’t quite set yet, and the last remnants of its warmth are still seeping into the office. You’re on your knees, Kerr’s hand a grounding presence in your hair, the barrel of his gun something– something else, not grounding, but similar. 

He trails it along your temple, murmuring words that make you feel more alive than any weapon against your skin ever could, and you think to yourself, you really didn’t plan to keep this up, now that you’ve got the job there’s hardly any need for that, but he had approached you and– And, well, you don’t exactly mind, either.

You half lean into the almost gentle touch of the gun while you keep sucking Kerr’s dick, and you don’t even flinch when you suddenly hear the tell-tale sound of the safety catch being released. 

Kerr pulls the trigger when he comes, and of course it’s been empty the whole time, but you didn’t know that and you dig your nails into his thighs and just a moment later come as well without even having been touched. Kerr chuckles and runs a hand through your hair, and you think about that you’ve seen them stained with blood before, his hands and his letter opener and the shirt of someone who’d been just a little too rude for his liking.

Hours later, when you’re home and lying in your bed, staring up at the ceiling, the mental image of Kerr’s letter opener is replaced with the memory of a needle in your hand, and you for the first time consciously realize that the sight and thought of blood reminds you of her, it’s not the killing, it’s the concept of red fluid running through someone’s veins, passing through a warm body, alive and with the potential ability to be cruel or kind, be anything.

The thought causes something; it makes something inside of you feel heavy and weird and– 

You can’t place it, and you don’t want to, and you want to forget, you want to leave this behind yourself completely, you want to stop thinking about her.)

* * *

You’re 19 and 20 and 21 and the sight of blood is still inescapably connected to the memory of her and her existence and her bedroom and the faint glint of glow-in-the-dark stars you’ve helped sticking to her ceiling.

You’re 22 and 23 and 24 and you wonder whether you’d still remember her phone number, sometimes.

You’re 25, 30, 35, and you pull the trigger, and you pull the trigger, and you pull the trigger, and there’s blood splattered against a brick wall in a dark alleyway, and there’s blood staining the underground parking lot of a huge apartment complex, and there’s blood forming a pool on Mr. Hyland’s carpet, and oh, you’ll catch hell for that, and–

–and it reminds you of Jamie, again and again and again, until, at some point, it doesn’t anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I'm @possessed-radios on tumblr, and @shortwaveattentionspan is my podcast sideblog.


End file.
